libsexy v0.1.9 had a small crasher bug in SexyIconEntry that was affecting some applications. 0.1.10 fixes it. If you’re experiencing any crash bugs as a result of libsexy v0.1.9, please download and give this a shot.
Love, Christian.
libsexy, libsexymm, and sexy-python 0.1.9 have been released.
libsexy v0.1.9 is just bug fix release (but a good one), containing the following fixes:
libsexymm and sexy-python contain license updates and were updated to work with libsexy v0.1.9. Both bindings claimed to be GPL, while they were intended to be LGPL. Sorry for the confusion, packagers 🙂
This year, I was one of the lucky few who received an invitation to O’Reilly’s Foo Camp. Like many people, I had heard just how cool this exclusive get-together is, but I was nowhere near prepared for how mind-blowingly awesome the Foo Camp experience can be.
I arrived in Sebastopol on Friday afternoon and began to unpack my tent. The tent I bought ended up being bigger than I expected I think I grabbed the wrong one, but it worked out fine given that I was sharing it with Alex Graveley. Alex wasn’t there yet, though, so I started to unpack it myself, which ended up being a bit difficult… But then a very kind and helpful Mark Shuttleworth walked by and offered a hand. Before long, the tent was set up and I was ready for the fun.
There were only a handful of people there at this point, so I decided to walk around and see the place. One of the rooms had this interesting table with a map on it. A projector was mounted above, and people were around the table, turning and tilting. It was quite cool. Turn the table and it zooms in and out. Tilt it and the map moves. It was the most natural way of viewing maps that I’ve ever used. Quite addicting in a way.
Outside was this kind of round spinnable art thing. It was like the table, but had this colored fluid sand-like substance inside. It was held up at an angle, and when you spun it, the sand-like stuff made some cool patterns. That was also fun to play with. 🙂
Before long, most of the Foo Camp guys were there, and we gathered under a tent to introduce ourselves and learn what was in store for us. It was amazing to see the people who were there. The creators of Digg, del.icio.us, LiveJournal, Second Life, 43things, Amazon, Meebo, Django, Chumby, people from Google, Microsoft, Intel, Yahoo… The list goes on and on.
I went to several sessions. There was one on the future of IM, another on robots, one on Dr. Who vs. Snakes on a Plane, another on Chumby hacking. I think I went to another one or two, but I can’t remember right now. They were all pretty interesting, and there were many more I didn’t have time to go to.
As mentioned above, one of the session talks was about Chumby. Chumby is a cute, soft, squishy Linux computer that is designed to sit next to your couch or your bed or whatever and stream flash content to you. The software and hardware are all open source, and there’s people modifying the casing of the Chumby and sticking it in teddy bears, Teletubbies, Hello Kitties, etc. It’s currently very pre-alpha (both the hardware and the software), but we all knew that. The Foo campers received free Chumbies. The public release will be in like 6 months or so, and should by then have more features and be a bit more stable. Still, it’s an interesting concept, and I hope they come up with a killer app for it. With an intended price tag of $150, it could be a good purchase with the right target audience and apps.
At nights, we would play Werewolf. This is pretty much a Foo Camp tradition, and is played well into the night. I was a werewolf only once, but we kicked ass that one time 🙂
Let’s see, what else was there… A Google plane flew overhead and took pictures, which will go on Google Maps at a 2 inch resolution. There were flame-throwing robots, a clown, lots of good food, new friends, a reverse scavenger hunt… Probably more things than I can list. It is the best event I have ever gone to, and I hope to be invited back next year. To whoever it was that put me on the invite list, thank you. This was an opportunity I will never forget.
(More pictures available in my gallery and tagged on Flickr.)
Virtual machines used to be all about managing your data center or server consolidation or running applications that only run on some other operating system. Lately, virtual machines have been gaining momentum in a new area: software distribution.
This is actually quite powerful. Instead of a giving a user a complex set of instructions for installing some application or web service, and telling them what they need to install beforehand and what distros or operating systems it works on, the distributor or project can instead provide a bare-bones virtual machine containing the application or service pre-configured, and users can simply download it and power it on. It’s a great way of previewing applications or even running them day-to-day (depending on the application).
There’s a wonderful service out there called Gallery. It’s a web-based photo gallery that users can install on their server in order to share photos with the world. There’s a number of modules available. Many programs work with it. You can do things like order prints through the web. Great program.
And it’s now available in a virtual appliance! They have a description and instructions for setting it up, and I’ve been informed that they plan to keep it updated with each new release. It contains both Gallery 1 and Gallery 2, giving users a chance to see the differences between the versions and decide which suits them best. It can be used in VMware Player, Server, Workstation, and probably ESX (I haven’t tried). It’s downloadable from their website or from VMTN. You can see h0bbel’s blog post for more information on the appliance.
I think this is awesome and I hope it works out well for them and for the users. I’d love to see more projects go this route, and with any luck, Gallery will have set a precedent in the web services world. And for the developers creating these appliances, please feel free to let us know what VMware could do to make your lives easier. We welcome feedback, and you can send it directly to me.
Several members of our team at work went to see Snakes on a Plane on Friday. A number of us have been looking forward to this movie and were jazzed about it. I didn’t expect it to be a good movie, but I expected it to be enjoyable. It actually exceeded my expectations in a number of ways. They even made somewhat of an attempt to come up with a plot! Not that you need one, given that in this movie, you have motherf***’n snakes on a motherf***’n plane. I mean, how awesome is that?
I don’t know if he was kidding or not, but Samuel L. Jackson mentioned on the daily show (video) that he’ll be in the sequel. I don’t know whether a sequel would be a good thing or a bad thing, but if they make it, it should definitely be called “Snakes on a Plane Again.”
And to further add to the, um, coolness? … someone made an All Your Snakes are Belong to Us video.
Oh, and Alex Graveley is now a zombie.
My girlfriend Jamie and I took a vacation to Santa Cruz. We both were looking forward to getting away from work and everything else and just relaxing for a few days. And relax we did. The trip was a blast, and like any good vacation, it went by quick.
We started the trip on Tuesday, August 8th, riding the Amtrak to Santa Cruz. We stayed at the Riverside Inn. It was not a great hotel. They forgot to give us a number of things… But, it was clean enough, and the prices were reasonable, especially for the area, and it was close to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk and various beaches. All in all, it wasn’t a bad place, as long as you don’t mind bugging the staff every day or so 🙂
We spent most of the first evening just getting settled into our hotel. We took a trip to the Boardwalk, which was only a couple blocks away. I had been there once before for the Workstation 5.0 release party, but a lot of it was closed off, so I didn’t realize just how big it was or how many rides were there. Jamie had never been there before, so this was in many ways a first for both of us.
We bought a 60 ticket sheet, which we later discovered may not have been the best investment. We expected to only be there for one day, and didn’t think the rides were as expensive as they were. Ah well. It turns out that on Mondays and Tuesdays after 5PM, the rides were only 1 ticket, so we did get to go on several before turning in for the night.
On the second day, Wednesday, we went to this little restaurant called the “Beach Street Cafe.” While the food was good, the service left much to be desired. It took forever for them to even acknowledge our existence and seat us. After breakfast, we hung out at the boardwalk and used some more of our tickets. We played miniature golf a couple of times and played a round of laser tag. It was a long, exhausting, but fun day. We found out that on Wednesdays and Thursdays after 5PM, unlimited ticket bracelets dropped from something like $28 to around $8, or something like $13 for one that included two free things like mini-golf and laser tag. We each got the $13 ticket bracelets, which we used for one of the mini-golf rounds and laser tag.
Mini-golf was a blast. The whole thing took place in this pirate caverns place. We haven’t played in years, so we were both pretty bad, but not as bad as we expected. Jamie was doing pretty good for a lot of it, once she warmed up. We kept score the first time, but decided it wasn’t worth it the second time, especially since we were trying to take pictures and didn’t want to hold up the people behind us.
The third day, Thursday, we rented a couple of wet suits and boogie boards and went to Seabright, a nice beach right next to Twin Lakes Beach. We were practically inbetween the two I guess. 20 feet away from Twin Lakes. The walk there was long and painful, as we kind of underestimated the distance and started off taking the long way around to there.
There weren’t that many people on the beach, which was nice because we expected to make fools out of ourselves. This was my second time boogie boarding, and I loved doing it, despite some minor injuries that resulted. Basically, I was hit by a wave and the board stuck in the sand, while my gut smacked into the top, knocking the wind out of me. It hurt for a bit, but there were no major injuries.
Jamie had never gone boogie boarding before, but I talked her into it and except for this one wave that took her by surprise, she enjoyed it too. We spent some time relaxing on the beach and making sand castles/pyramids. We were there probably 4 hours or so. Then we begun the long walk back. We then proceeded to go back to the Boardwalk for some more fun.
On the fourth day, Friday, we decided to buy souvenirs and go on a few more rides. I bought a pirate hour glass, a whole bunch of shot glasses, a towel, some Santa Cruz poker chips, and probably some other stuff. There was a store there getting rid of a bunch of their inventory and they said we could name the price on several things, so we bought up a bunch of half broken and useless junk 🙂 Some of it was nice, though, and very fixable.
That was our last real day, as we had to leave Saturday. We spent the evening on the wharf, going to a nice restaurant for dinner, and just walking around. Our legs were very sore by the end of all this, by the way. 🙂
On Saturday, we went home and attempted to relax, exhausted after our busy but extremely fun trip.
Update: More pics available here.
I needed a test avatar for a site I’m working on, and thought, “Hey, I’ll use my pirate picture.” But then I realized it just wasn’t piratey enough. So I wasted spent a bit of time and gimped it up a bit.
Clearly this should be the basis for my new Planet hackergotchi.
As most people have probably seen on Slashdot or Digg by now, we just released VMware Server 1.0. As promised, it is a free product and should run your virtual machines much faster than the earlier betas did.
(If you’re not sure what VMware Server is all about, please read my original post.)
VMware Server has already been deployed at several companies ever since beta 1. I’ve always found that amusing, given how young the product was at that stage (even though this is essentially GSX 4). However, my experience in talking to beta testers so far is that most people are pretty happy with the product, especially given the price. I am personally running it at home for my Linux development VMs and it has been working nicely.
My thanks go out to all the testers that have reported problems or who have given us feedback of any kind. As one of the developers on VMware Server, it has been nice hearing positive reports and stories :).
I just put out a release of libnotify 0.4.1. It has support for the new GtkStatusIcon (when compiled against GTK+ 2.9.2 or higher) and the documentation has been moved over to gtk-doc, so if you compile libnotify with –enable-gtk-doc, you should see a new “Libnotify” book in devhelp. There’s also a bunch of bug fixes too. Release notes are available.
I have some nice fixes and feature enhancements planned for notification-daemon that I’d like to get to before long. Some optional window slide-in/out or fade-in/out effects for the notification bubbles, maybe a new theme, and better notification placement.
Update: libnotify 0.4.2 is now released, with a G_BEGIN_DECLS and G_END_DECLS in notify.h so that deadchip can make C++ bindings. Woot!
I was talked into buying a Nintendo DS a while back, and was about to shell out the money when I found out that the DS Lite was in development. So I waited… and waited… and then preordered… and waited some more… And now I have it! It’s quite cool, actually. I bought New Super Mario Bros, Mario Kart, and Princess Peach (for my girlfriend). I think I’m going to buy Brain Age and Tetris DS in a couple of days.
So I’m looking for two things now: Friend codes and game suggestions. If you have one of the above games and wish to share your friend code, or you have any games you highly recommend I buy, please either post a comment or e-mail me.